Twitter – Diary of a Mad Millennial

To Live and Die on Twitter

Here I was worried about having a Twitter in my name thinking I’d get in trouble for tweeting out my unfiltered beliefs online that I’d deactivated not one, not two, not three, but four (possibly five) Twitter accounts with my actual name.

Come 2016, I briefly had a Twitter for the minor league team. About a month or so after coming back to Atlanta, that shit was gone. I turfed it and went on with life.

And then the Nazi president struck and suddenly I needed to be back on that little bird app to make sure the world hadn’t ended in 180 characters or less.

I’d made a handful of “anonymous” accounts, basically just accounts without my name (like this blog). I did have one last account with my true identity before getting rid of that sucker in 2018. Thinking I could safely browse the Twitter-sphere, I forayed into that great valley of memes and feet pics/thirst traps under my assumed name.

At first I only browsed. Then the browsing turned into casual likes, and retweets, and eventually full-on tweets. Sometimes, even telling Trump to go fuck himself personally! What a thrill to verbally assault that fucking orange clown!

And then I began “violating” Twitter’s policies: one time was for telling someone to play in traffic, another for telling the official @GOP account to “eat shit and die”.

With one anonymous account down, I resorted to posting on my self-described “sports” account in which I’d try to avoid the political bullshit, more or less making that little corner of binary code my home for venting about the state of the pandemified world.

Of course, I interacted with more and more people, inevitably catching Twitter’s attention for a handful tweets, like the time I reacted to a post where a woman posted screenshots of demented texts from her abusive father who beat her and her mother on the regular. Upon my reply of “I wanna beat this fucking guy to shit WOW you abusive fucking prick”, I was suspended for abuse and harassment even though 1) I wasn’t tweeting at this man in particular and 2) HE WAS THREATENING HIS DAUGHTER WHO WENT ON TWITTER AND POST SAID THREATS AS HER OWN WAY OF COPING.

And yet that caught me a 10-day Twitter jail run.

But of all the times I more or less told Candace Owens to go fuck herself, called Matt Walsh a stupid fascist, or even went after Donald Fucking Trump himself, the final straw was the following:

YES, you read that correctly!

“I don’t see Tucker Carlson, I just see a redneck.”

And thus, the Twitter gods consigned my 20-follower account to ***SUSPENSION**** (pending review).

In direct violation of their policy that you must not create a new account to skirt a suspension, I fucking did that shit knowing that just like the last account I had this happen, they were never gonna give me a chance. So, I figured I’d try again.

And dear reader, I made an account that racked up 6 followers IN ONE DAY.

I felt FAMOUS, ALIVE: I had BEATEN the Great Jack Dorsey and his merry band of sometimes-not-completely-oblivious-to-actual-harassment moderators policing the high seas of the Timeline.

Alas, I tried following the girl with the abusive father and send her message, something I couldn’t do without listing my phone number.

And dear reader, you know damn well my stupid ass posted the only phone number I own, the very one linked with my currently suspended account. You know, the same account they told me not to try skirting around the suspension with a new account?

Hardly the smartest social media violation I’ve ever committed, but sadly it will more than likely end my Twitter days.

All of this, keep in mind, beginning because I was too damn afraid to have a Twitter in my own name in the first place.

All’s well that ends well, I suppose.

Maybe Tom from MySpace will welcome me back.

No Justice, No Peace

**When will this scene go away? (Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)**

G-d damn it.

G-d damn all of it.

It’s not enough that the country faces a highly infectious respiratory virus without effective treatments or a vaccine.

It’s not enough that the unemployment figures continue to skyrocket in spite of callous state governors re-opening businesses against all recommendations from infectious disease experts.

It’s not enough to have COVID-19 be an everyday killer within minority communities.

It’s not enough that George Floyd died at the hands of a racist.

It’s not enough that the sack of pompous shit in the Oval Office laughs at American journalists being laid off, or that he accuses a man of murder to the dismay of the alleged murder victim’s widower.

It’s not enough. Any of it. And it’s fucking infuriating beyond belief.

When scores of white people march the streets protesting the tyranny of state governments protecting their communities from being obliterated by the coronavirus, they’re met peacefully by health care workers standing stoically in the face of batshit conspiratorial charges and insanity, and state capitol police officers taking up-close-and-personal vitriol by men with assault rifles without moving so much as an inch.

When unarmed black people protest the unlawful murder of a black man at the hands of the police, as has happened time and again over the past 10 years, they’re shot with rubber bullets and tear gas. They’re forced to not only disperse, but are violently assaulted by the same cabal of murderers that started this whole fucking nightmare.

Meanwhile, senators caught profiting off of insider information are essentially set free before a charge can be laid by the President’s new law firm, the Justice Department. An organization run by a man who openly admitted that the victors can rewrite history to gloss over the acquittal of a friend to the President even after said friend plead guilty to charges of lying to the FBI. A man who believes that the President can apparently do fuck all without so much as facing a congressional committee.

A man who can tweet utter bullshit at will because Twitter is too chickenshit to exercise its right as a private company to consign Orange Hitler’s Twitter account to the same fate as the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones.

Tara Reade can lie about Joe Biden assaulting her and make him look like a potentially unfit candidate for the White House. Donald Trump can lie about hydroxychloroquine’s super-effective treatment of COVID-19 and receive one little “this is actual fake news” warning label after lying on Twitter for a decade and be given credibility when the press constantly asks if Trump has a point when sharing his crackpot musings because, you know, “objectivity”.

There comes a time when the needs of the many has to outweigh the needs of the few.

In America, the needs of the few have consistently outweighed the needs of everyday citizens seeking the preposterous and antiquated American Dream.

Now, it’s only a question of if this decades-old ailment will kill the country before COVID does.